Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday January 22, 2014 @02:01PM
from the dueling-space-probe-solos dept.

New submitter samshead writes in with a bit of interesting news from GÉANT (the European research network): "GÉANT ... recently demonstrated its power by sonifying 36 years’ worth of NASA Voyager spacecraft data and converting it into a musical duet. ... To compose the spacecraft duet, 320,000 measurements were first selected from each spacecraft, at one hour intervals. Then that data was converted into two very long melodies, each comprising 320,000 notes using different sampling frequencies ... The result of the conversion into waveform, using such a big dataset, created a wide collection of audible sounds, lasting just a few seconds (slightly more than 7 seconds at 44.1kHz) to a few hours (more than 5hours using 1024Hz as a sampling frequency). A certain number of data points, from a few thousand to 44,100 were each 'converted' into 1 second of sound."Listen to the song (it plays using HTML5 audio if you pretend to be an iPhone, otherwise it requires Flash).

I had a completely different experience. First, I think there would be many orchestras that would consider playing this score for it represents something new, fresh yet still melodic. A lot different then some of the "modern" classical written today.

As Iistened I did hear a story. This is about two ships, doing the same thing yet different. Separated by millions of miles the travel at the same rate, but yet sned moments of difference. It is a story about movement, progress, almost a happy feeling of pu

1. Someone will publish it to Youtube and it will promptly be blocked because of some automated cease and desist that algorithmically determined that there was a set of two notes that, if piped through a cat being boiled, then fed through a synthesizer and finally broadcast over shortwave halfway around the world, might vaguely resemble their copyrighted work. If you were drunk.

2. Someone will (correctly) observe that it has more artistic value than the last couple of One Direction albums.

3. Someone will comment on how it's an epic waste of tax dollars, and demand to know what possible value the entire field of science and technology has. They will do this using a computer, sitting in a temperature controlled building, connected to a power grid, which has CNN streaming on TV in the background through a satellite. They will not see the irony.

Figures it'd take an anoymous coward to ruin the joke by posting the answer...;) You were supposed to make some snide comment about how I couldn't do math and I needed "more training"... not be all intelligent and shit. Guh! Know your place, Anon!

They sampled some data, re-arranged it, assigned different bits to different 'instruments', and fiddled with it until it until it sounded like a symphony. So what? The first, oh, ten thousand times or so somebody did this I suppose it was news... but the tech is old hat. Old enough that garage musicians have been doing it with off-the-shelf equipment for at least a decade.

We usually go with data visualization but data sonification can be interesting as well. log4jfugue is an open source project designed to turn any application's log4j output into a pentatonic music stream.

I wonder what their musical mapping methodology was in approaching this? The problem with sonifying any dataset is that it's easy to pump out random-walk notes mapped to a scale, which is what this sounds like. I don't really notice any rhythmic mappings which would help make this alot more interesting.